
Glass t- (p ? T 



AN ADDRESS 



ON THE 



LIFE AND CHARACTER 



— OF — 



JAMES ABRAM GARFIELD, 

Twentieth President of the United States, 

DELIVERED 

SEPTEMBER 27th, 1881, 

(the day appointed for mourning and humiliation,) 

AT GRACE METHODIST EPISCOPAL CHURCH, 

BY 

R. STOCKETT MATHEWS, 



Stenographioally Reported by Douglass A. Brown. 



CURRY, CLAY & COMPANY, 

Steam Printers, &c., 24 German St. 

BALTIMORE. 

1881. 



AN ADDRESS 

ON THE ^"""T/C/ 

LIFE AND CHARACTER 



JAMES ABRAM GARFIELD, 

Twentieth President of the United States, 



'5 



DELIVERED 



SEPTEMBER 27th, 1881, 

(the day appointed for mourning and humiliation,) 

AT GRACE METHODIST EPISCOPAL CHURCH, 



n. STOCKETT M.i THEWS. 

II 



Stenog]{apuically Reported by Douglass A. Brown. 



CURRY, CLAY & COMPANY, 

Steam Printers, &c., 24 German St, 

BALTIMORE. 

1881. 



^1 



Baltimore, September 29th, 1881. 
Hon. R. Stockett Mathews, 

Dear Sir : 

We have been deeply gratified by the address 
which you delivered on Monday last, at Grace Methodist Episcoijal 
Church. 

It is conceded by all who heard it to have been as discriminating 
and appreciative as it was thoughtful and scholarly. 

The published report in The American, admirable as it was, contri- 
buted only a large fragment of the whole, and we are anxious that so 
just and adequate a eulogy, should be printed in some more permanent 
form. 

We therefore earnestly request you to furnish us with a copy for 
publication, and at the same time tender to you our cordial thanks for 
the service you have rendered the countrymen of the lamented Presi- 
dent, in giving them a portraiture of his life and character, as eloquent 
as it was impartial. 

Very truly, yours, 

FERDINAND C. LATROBE, HENRY F. GAREY, 

KEEN & HAGERTY, FRANCIS P. STEVENS, 

JOHN L. THOMAS, Jr., SAMUEL M. SHOEMAKER, 

ABR'M B. PATTERSON, D. H. CARROLL, 

SAMUEL H. ADAMS, JOHN Q. A. HERRING, 

JOSEPH H. CADDEN, LOUIS C. MULLER, 

JAMES W. FLACK, Pastor of Grace M. E. Church. 

H. WEBSTER GROWL, OLI\' ER W. CLAY, 

JOHN K. SHAW, WM. H. CURRY, 

WM. H. GRAHAM, HENRY F. JOHNSON. 



Baltimore, Sept. 30th, 1881. 

Hon. Ferdinand C. Latrdbe, Hon. Henry F. Oarey, Hon. John L. Thomas, Jr., 
Hon. Francis P. Stevens, Sam'l M. Shoemaker, Esq., Jno. Q. A. Herring, Esq., 
Hon. Abr^m B. Pattei'son, Rev. Louis C. Midler, Wm. H. Oraham, Esq., 
and others. 

Gentlemen : 

I am in receipt of your favor of yesterday, and 
am very much obliged to you for its kind approval of the address 
at Grace Church. I take pleasure in sending you the full report 
prepared by the Stenographer, Mr. Douglas A. Brown. 
Very truly, yours, 

R. STOCKETT MATHEWS. 



ADDR ESS. 



The proclamation of the living President has convened the 
people in assemblages of mourning for the dead ; — of humilia- 
tion for themselves. Every invocation to the former, come 
from whatever source it may, is superfluous. The appeal for 
the latter addresses itself with remorseless emphasis to every 
thoughtful, every prayerful well-wisher of his country who 
feels that we have been following too much the devices of our 
own hearts. Over all the fairest portions of our vast world 
the wisest and best of mankind are deploring, as never before, 
the death of only one person from the unnumbered millions 
of the human family. We are sharers in a catholic grief 
which, unhappily, requires moderation rather than stimulant. 
Peasants and princes, kings and queens, hewers of wood and 
drawers of water, as well as the leaders of progress and dis- 
covery in other climes, are directing their eyes towards the 
newer continent and its young republic with unaft'ected sor- 
row, almost as keen— wellnigh as profound— as our own. 
Never before has just such an existence passed through so 
many different, picturesque phases, to the pathos and tragedy 
of an ending so totally unexpected, and so appalling. He was 
the son of a widow, born in a cabin. He fell, in the noonday 
of anticipation, from that station which the statesmen of the 
United States have been accustomed to deem the zenith of 
human ambition. 

The plaintive monody which flows from the heart of the 
stricken nation winds from hamlet to hamlet, from city to 
city, and its echoes are repeated again and again, until the 



reverberations traverse the circumference of our planet, and 
return to swell the volume of the still fresh lamentations on 
our farthest shores. 

He possessed so many attractive excellencies of character, 
united with so many and such versatile capabilities for use- 
fulness, that the consolations of memory, as we ponder what 
he was and has achieved, are impotent to assuage the anguish 
of a thousand ungratified hopes. Crushed by such a dispensa- 
tion, we shrink from attempting to foreshadow darkly what he 
might have been, and might have done. 

Nature and culture, each at its best, were to be seen in his 
full development, joining the graciousness of an even unselfish 
temperament, the tender strength of constant affections, the 
generous enthusiasms of a large and liberal spirit, with every 
grace and refinement and fascination of speecli and manner, 
which could be acquired from the pursuit of the loftiest ob- 
jects, and enhanced by familiarity with the most elevating 
studies. 

"The noblest things, which are sweetness and light," says 
Dean Swift; and of these the Magistrate who is gone had 
more than ample share, mingling in such harmony that, while 
one bewails the perishing of a personage so eminent by the 
hand of an ignoble assassin, one renders the homage of a 
genuine distress, of a stunning sadness for which tears are the 
only eloquence, to the son, the husband, the father, M'ho was 
our brother, and whose virtues liave ennobled humanity in 
our own eyes. It is an inspiration, as we contemplate his 
course of a. single score of years, not so much to emulate his 
intellectual acquisitions, or to take pattern after his incom- 
parable performances, as to try to become such as he was to 
those nearest to him, by the fireside and in the library; and 
to fit ourselves to be trusted and respected as he was. 

Gentleness of disposition, a heart luminous with joy, and 
unfailing cheerfulness, are potent to win and hold the attach- 
ments of those with whom we may be associated. After all, 
to be able to forge the enduring bonds which are made fast 
and strong by the affinities of taste and sympathy and feeling. 



and to come back from toil or sacrifice or prominence to the 
privacy and repose of the enchanted home in which love is 
master of all feasts and ceremonies, and congenial friends, 
however few, gather about us, this is, indeed, the richest com- 
pensation for every endeavor, the charm and unchanging de- 
light of the highest tbnns of being. It is because he shone 
conspicuous for these social and domestic virtues, because he 
had such a simple, symmetrical mdividuality, that his taking 
oiF — '^a deed without a name" — awakens with such pitiful 
intensity all our better emotions, and we cannot be charged 
with weakness when we weep over him, either in solitude, 
or with the multitude. 

[Here the speaker paused for a. moment, and then re- 
suming, said : ] 

I had written thus far, and nothing more, when a realiza- 
tion of tlie tremendous loss to which our people and humanity 
and posterity have so suddenly been subjected, came over me, 
and with it, in mental panorama, such a direful train of im- 
mediate ills and probable conse<juences, conjured by no will- 
ing imagination, that 1 was constrained to throw aside my 
pen, alid to abandon all attempt to prepare myself for this 
■evening's task, until I should stand in the presence of an audi- 
ence whose faith and prayers would banish the unbidden and 
unweloom-e visions from my sight. 

Only a little while ago, it seems as if we could touch the 
radiant day by stretching our hands towards the invisible 
■calendar, the residents of Washington beheld such a pageant 
as had never before made their avenues tremulous with the 
bustle of an inauguration. Only a few months ago a strong 
man, in the very meridian of his physical bloom and beauty, 
who had not yet reached the ripeness and maturity of his 
transcendent intellect, came, at mid-day, before a great throng 
of his admiring fellow-citizens. Tho Chief Justice of the 
Supremo Court, in full robes, was stationed before him. Sena- 
tors and Representatives of the Nation clustered about him ; 
just by his side stood the venerable woman who had borne 
Jain) and Lad rai&ed him, and had carried him through privation 



6 

and poverty, to the perfection of a character replete with 
dignity and magnanimity; another, not less dear, with hap- 
py looks, whose gentle nature had tempered his own to a 
richer fineness, waited at his right hand. And when he had 
pronounced the great declaration, that he would see that the 
Republic should suffer no detriment, and it had been carried 
on high to be recorded for eternity, his first act was one of 
gratelnl recognition to the instrumentalities which had been 
most cfticiicious in the monlding and fashioning of hi> char- 
acter, to those who had been the animators and guides of his 
career; and he bent his stately head to kiss the mother whose 
lips had taught him the Lord's Prayer, and the wife from 
whose changeless confidence he had drawn the first sweet 
baptism of that bliss which surpasses all other happiness 
known on earth. From that hour he entered upon a brief 
conduct of affairs, in which, with almost startling abruptness, 
he revealed to our people new qualities, which are demonstra- 
ble by public servants ; moral intrepidity that was absolutely 
inflexible; a superiority to malign counsels and untoward 
incitements, that would not permit him, for a moment, to- 
stoop to any dishonoring surrender of the prerogatives of the 
Executive, although, by dalliance or concession, he might 
have purchased temporary quietude for himself. 

His Secretary of the Treasury, whose ability and long 
training were supplemented and encouraged by the sound 
and accurate views of his superior, went on to finish that 
great act, the funding of the National Debt, M-hich has made 
every Chancellor of the Exchequer, in foreign Empires, marvel 
beyond expression at the lessons of ix)litical economy which 
are being illustrated among us, by steadfast dependence upon 
the honesty and resources of our countrymen. From every 
quarter, from Maine to California, from Oregon to Florida, 
although hosts of those who were seeking substantial rewards 
for their partisan activity flocked in crowds to the Capital ; 
this President, of such extraordinary self-poise and definite 
purpose, dismissed office-seekers by the thousand, remitted 
them to other avocations, and was the first of our rulers> for 



many successive terms, to announce, as the irreversible princi- 
ple of his administration, that no one should be disturb- 
ed in the tenure of a subordinate post so long as he was 
capable, and honest, and faithful, until the expiration of his 
commission; and that then his merits should be considered as 
thoroughly, and as conscientiously, as the claims of others who 
might be applicants for patronage. And if he had done 
nothing in his short official occupation, or indeed throughout 
the whole manhood of which nearly a moiety had been 
devoted to the public, but to establish an inflexible regulation 
in this praiseworthy direction, he would have left a memory 
to the American people immeasurably precious, and an ex- 
ample of deference to the crying desiderata of our civil 
service which none of his immediate successors will be rash 
enough to ignore. 

Who was this hero? The bells of St. Paul's Cathedral, of 
London, answer with their resonant tongues. The Canons 
and Prebendaries of the Cathedral of Liverpool, the pro- 
digious numbers congregating in chapels and churches, and 
beneath the groined dome of the Alexandra Palace, are utter- 
ing, for our English-speaking kindred on the other side, some 
measure of the prevalent sympathy which they feel in a com- 
mon calamity. In the villages, in the universities, in the 
capital of Germany, that name, which is seldom absent from 
our thoughts, is being pronounced as softly, and as reverently, 
and as lovingly, as in our broad Commonwealth, The English 
Court has been ordered to wear the symbols of mourning ; the 
Spanish Court, also, has been directed to put on the emblems 
of royal grief. From the recent Republic of France, our 
younger sister, are transmitted the graceful condolences of its 
President, its Senators and Deputies, its writers and nobility. 
In every harbor, from the Northern Isles to the Pillars of 
Hercules, along the Mediterranean, and by the margins of the 
Gulf of Yenice, in the ports of Sweden, Denmark and Russia, 
the national flags on every ship are flying at half-mast. Even 
in the mosques of Constantinople the Moslems are forgetting 
to bend their knees to the rising sun, are omitting to chant 



the prayers of the Koran to their Prophet, and are breathing 
benisons for the dead ruler of the free people across the 
resounding sea. 

Was there ever, since the world began, a disaster so widely, 
so simultaneously appreciated, so cordially, so compassionately 
bemoaned ? No distance too great, no population too isolated, 
no civilization too alien, no religion too restricting, no parti- 
tion too impervious, no artificial barrier of any kind suflicient 
to restrain kindred humanity from turning towards us, and 
boAving their heads with us in an affliction that is over- 
whelming, and craving for us a deliverance from its burdens, 
which can only come from the King of Kings, ^nd Lord of 
Lords ! 

O, if the issues of life and death are meted out by a blind, 
blundering fate, how wretched must we be to-day ! But, thanks 
be to God, they are in the hands of a benignant and intelli- 
gent Providence, working through grand laws, fulfilling His 
primeval scheme, and throwing now, as He did from the be- 
ginning, the whole majesty and grandeur of His unerring 
comprehension into the upward progression of our race. And 
we know, that unless the mission of our Republic be ended, 
unless free institutions have gratified their predestined scope, 
that the Creator, whose plans summoned us to another attest- 
ation of their practicability, will still continue our evolution 
through His own ways, for His own purposes, which antedate 
historic ages ; that He will yet bring us to the expansion and 
roundness of a national history which will exhibit man's ca- 
pacity for self-government, and the enjoyment of the bless- 
ings of civil and religious freedom, protected by the toleration 
and charity which can only thrive in a State without nobles 
or aristocracy. 

The death of President Garfield may prove the advent of a 
new epoch, the beginning of ameliorations "devoutly to be 
wished for," — the dawn of innovations and reformations, about 
which we have thought and felt acutely for many years, — of 
which some have latterly written and spoken, despairingly, — 
towards wh'^n this visitation may impel us, not so rapidly or 



expensively as we were forced eighteen years ago, to sanction 
another great revohition ; but, nevertheless it may compel ns 
to commence the needful changes which remain for us to 
establish, and about which I shall say something presently. 

It is one of the peculiar features of our political equality, 
that no boy, however humble his birth, however narrowing 
and depressing the circumstances by which he may be sur- 
rounded, and however little aid he may receive from others, 
need feel that there is any insuperablie necessity for his con- 
tinuance in obscurity. To be free to lift up one's eyes and 
see the shining portal of the Temple of Fame, to be able to 
long for the strength to mount up to it, and the courage to 
enter it, constitute, after all, half the battle. The boy who has 
felt stirring within him the yearning, the deep longing to be 
something and to do something and to know everything, has 
already half conquered the world. But he must hunger for 
knowledge — thirst for honor. If he act persistently, in keep- 
ing with such aspirations and motions of his soul, pausing 
neither on the one hand to listen to the alluring temptations 
of vice, nor on the other to satisfy merely sordid greed, but 
determined to dedicate himself to a life work of noble eiFort 
and distinction, will keep before him the great maxims and 
principles by whose informing and unfolding vitalization, 
others have wooed and won a two-fold immortality, before he 
has overstepped his half of a century he will be able to reach 
the coveted summit where others have carved their names, 
and, standing on the very loftiest heights of opportunity, he 
can turn and ask others, less fortunate, to behold in him the 
actual fruition of beneficent laws; to confess that his success 
is only signal proof of what may be accomplished by a free- 
man in a land where every man is something in himself, with 
greater facility and certainty than in those societies amid 
which rank and precedence and importunity are usually 
pre-requisites to the earning of a brilliant celebrity, and an 
introduction to public consideration, in the halls of Parliament 
or Assembly. 

I should like to be able to tell you just how it was, and when 



10 

it was, that he, whose title I need not mention, whose image 
has melted into every breast, first came to suspect that there 
were within himself some attributes that ordinary men do 
not possess; an adaptability, a perceptibility, an impression- 
ability ; a capacity for the acquisition of learning;, for the 
assimilation of truth ; a persistency of motives, a willingness 
to deny himself, a readiness to submit to any suffering that 
would onl}' clothe and equip him with the mj'stic enginery 
of art and science, and literature, those leverages through 
whose help men lift themselves; until he could go forth 
heir of the teachings of the great and good, full and efficient, 
ready to take his place among men, to assert his right to take 
part in moulding the future and to occupy his proper attitude 
"in the foremost files of time." And when you remember 
from what low estate he started, and where he was working 
in modesty and patience only a few years ago, and what he 
grew to be through the legitimate outgrowth of his own sys- 
tematic and methodical use of his capacities, aided of course, 
fructified and enriched, by what he gained from contact with 
other minds, you can see, that given a sound heart, an earnest 
ambition, and clever faculties — the seemingly ordinary facul- 
ties of childhood — and, by keeping at work all the time ; by 
burning the midnight lamp; by the consecration of one's self 
to the invisible ends of life, to the intangible compensations, 
to those things which no one can gather at will by stretching 
forth his hand, nor transmute into gold, or place, or position 
for the time being, by any cunning guile "or necromancy; by 
an apprenticeship to high ideas; by faithfulness to far-off 
ideals ; little by little, year by year, never lapsing aside from 
the upward paths, however difficult ; a brave American boy 
can at last reach the vantage-ground of glory, can be a figure 
of mark, and what is better still, may learn to do abiding 
deeds and to speak ringing words which shall elevate a whole 
people to loftier conceptions of duty ; 



"May mould a mighty State's decree, 
And shape the whisper of the throne.' 



11 

It is not a close proximity between a Western canal and 
the executive residence of the President of the United States. 
Long as is the physical interval between Lake Erie and 
Washington, the moral and intellectual stadia over which he 
had to journey were longer still ; and yet it took but twenty 
years for him to travel the whole distance and to reach his 
place ; by no short cuts, no secret road ; a place for which he 
did not intrigue or barirain by any contemptible artifice, any 
illegitimate pushing. Twenty years ! Think of it. Father- 
less son of a poor widow; canal boy, a lad driving mules on 
the tow-path ; a daily laborer, chopping wood at twenty-five 
cents a cord, or mowing down the grass of the fragrant mead- 
ows for half a dollar an acre ; a rough carpenter, hewing out 
the green logs of the forest to build the scant log-houses of 
farmers in that sparsely-settled wilderness ; a student in the 
district school ,' and then the certified teacher of those who 
had been his playmates and comrades; next a painstaking 
scholar, fitted to enter the junior class of a first rate college ; 
soon a graduate ; a professor of languages ; the youthful pres- 
ident of Hiram College, carrying eager and ardent minds 
through the curriculum of the humanities ; then a member of 
the State Senate of Ohio ; at twenty-nine, lieutenant-colonel 
of a regiment of volunteers, one whole company of which was 
composed of the undergraduates who had attended his lec- 
tures, and were willing to go out to death, if need be, with 
him ; then helmsman of a frail vessel, through forty-eight hours 
of peril, during which no experienced pilot could be found to 
steer it over the impetuous rapids of the swollen Big Sandy 
river — to bear succor to his famishing soldiers— steering it 
with a hand as firm, and an eye as clear, as yours or mine as 
we sit in the tranquillity of this sacred edifice ; then forcing 
battle with a commander more accomplished in military craft 
than himself, and with triple the number of his troops, and 
driving him from his mountain fastnesses, and winning the 
first grand magnetic triumph in the war for the Union ; then 
detached to report to General Rosecranz, as his Chief of 
Staff; then, at the fateful battle of Chickamauga, when the 



12 

main wing of the army, under the Conimander-in-chief, was 
pierced, and disheveled, and dissipated in flight, making his 
way alone through briar, and brake, and forest, until he re- 
turned to the front, where General Thomas was still mar- 
shaling a wall of human adamant against out-numbering 
legions, and aiding him to hurl back their assaults ; then 
with his own hands assisting General Granger to fire the 
parting fusilade of artillery, which rang out like n,feu-de-joie^ 
and told that the awful combat of the doubtful day had 
closed with night and victory, and that new lustre had been 
shed upon the loyal arms ; then, at thirty-one, a Major Gen- 
eral ; then nominated, without his solicitation of a single vote, 
and elected a Representative in Congress, for six successive 
terms ; then, by the unanimous choice of his party, made 
Senator- elect; and before taking his seat in the Senate, nomi- 
nated, and, in spite of his advocacy of another, chosen Presi- 
dent of the United States, in the forty-ninth year of his age. 

O! beautiful youth! O! strenuous and consummate man- 
hood ! Coming up from such an origin to take the coronation 
of a simple oath, and tread upon a level with kings and 
emperors in obedience to the suffrages of a free people, the 
intelligent suffrages of a free people; — fur the majority which 
crowned him as Chief Magistrate was the aggregate ex- 
pression of the best conscience and intellect of this nation. 
Never before did any candidate enter the Executive Mansion, 
more palpably, and undeniably, by the deliberate approval and 
discriminating sanction, of the better classes in the critical 
communities of America. 

Here is a climax which surpasses the fables of antiquity, 
the legends of mythology. Here is a rapid, unintermitting 
ascent which beggars description and impoverishes language 
to portray. I challenge those who are most conversant with 
the biographies of the great worthies of the past to point out 
to me, among them all, a parallel to this almost marvelous 
rise to exalted stations and honors. Is it to be wondered at, 
that now he has disappeared from the theatre of the world's 
activities, that he has thus unexpectedly perished by the 



13 

stroke of a monster more exeera1)le than tlic Cain)an of Shaks- 
pere ; is it astonishino; that now, when all his acquisitions, 
all his attainments, all his elegant and affluent scholarship, 
all his unique and lovable traits of personality, all that he 
was, all that he might have been, have been extinguished ; 
is it amazing that our tears are flowing like rivers of waters? 
Is it phenomenal that there comes over us such a feeling of 
inexpressible regret, when we think of all these things; and 
when the weight of this immeasurable loss strikes us with 
its resistless force, we seem in vain to lean upon our faith 
in Jehovah, and can only blindly, despairingly, beseech him 
to give us some surcease of sorrow, to give us some med- 
icament for the nation's woe. 

And yet, — and yet, my friends, this death, after all, we 
must hope, we must trust, all of us must firmly believe, may 
and will prove a very day-spring of manifold blessings to our 
people, and to the generations of an nnvexed future. 

We need a national introspection; we need a reminder 
from the heavens that "all we like sheep have gone astray." 
We are none of us, I fear, altogether guiltless, in the eye of the 
great Giver of all good, of our brother's blood. Jf we had 
been true, each and every one of us, high and low, to our 
civic duties, from the earliest youth up to the present dismal 
day; if we had been bending our energies to foster virile 
public opinion, and mould healthy public sentiment; if we 
had not lent ourselves to augment the rancors of partisanship, 
and to increase the hateful phrenzies of faction ; if we had 
not perverted our inestimable privileges, standing silently by, 
time and again, acquiescent, passive, content to witness the 
elevation of bad men into posts of power, simply because, being 
glib talkers, they could arouse the noisy huzzahs of the masses; 
if we had not been indifferent to the perversion of our elect- 
ive system, and supinely willing to surrender its operations 
to the manipulation and control of "managers" and "bosses;" 
if we had not been too long only too willing to "permit trading 
politicians to make a business of selecting our liepresentatives 
in Congress; if we had always demanded that competition 



14 

tor such offices should be 0])en, that the choice of the fittest 
should be a uniform rule and practice, that public men should 
have clean hands, and possess at least decent attainments in 
the rudiments of political science; if we had insisted upon 
the choice of delegates who were capable of comprehending 
the elementary axioms of good government, who could not 
only spell out the heads of existing laws, but could devise 
amendments and frame new statutes to remedy the deficien- 
cies of the old, and extirpate some of the numerous evils of 
our jurisprudence, and make more homogeneous and symmet- 
rical our civil polities, and help to beautify and adorn all our 
institutions until they should reach their ultimate perfection : 
if we had kept watch and ward over the tendencies of every 
democracy to beget a thousand evils when the wise and dis- 
interested and patriotic are excluded from public employ- 
ment, this terrible evil could not, would not, have happened. 
We have accepted idols of stubble, of wood and brass. We 
have been lured by orators who had the dramatic trick of 
titillating the ears ot heterogeneous crowds from the rostrum 
and the hustings. We have, without protest, without opposi- 
tion, permitted professional politicians to compass their paltry 
schemes, to frame together before our very eyes what is 
called in common speech, "the machine," and have embold- 
ened them, by apathy at least, to grind out results which have 
shamed, if not degraded us. We have been Avilling to submit 
sometimes to imperious and capricious charlatans, and to see 
combinations of demagogues efi'ected openly for the express 
purpose of lifting into power some "expedient candidate," 
some "strong man" who would be as clay in the hands of the 
potter in promoting the behests of his staunch confederates. 
If every one of us had written to the editors of newspapers 
what we thought of harmful events as they transpired, and 
had fearlessly, justly criticised candidates and jobs, and chi- 
cane; or had called our people together in town meetings, to 
reprobate pernicious methods for the profit and admonition of 
false leaders; if we had always discharged our inherited part 
as citizens, and had felt the sanctity of the obligation resting 



15 

upon us, and, solicitous to exalt the standards of citizenship, 
had stood upon the outermost walls, whether men were intent 
to deter us, or heed us, had cried continually against our 
degeneracy, and the patent shortcomings of our fellows, this 
fell misdeed, which slew the beloved, would not have been 
wrought. For James A. Gariield has fallen a victim to the 
intolerance of a single faction, out-spoken and loud-spoken 
until its hot poison, falling into the distempered brain of that 
iniquitous wretch in Washington, fired him to slay the most 
conspicuous opponent of the mischiefs and practices 1 have 
been enumerating, just so surely as Henri Quatre became a 
martyr to the Protestant opposition to the Jesuits, and was 
slain by the fanatical dagger of Ravaillac, or as Lincoln, died a 
sacrifice to the expiring fury of civil war. Infamous creatures 
are never wanting to hurry forward in periods of exceptional 
excitement, and translate into abhorrent acts the logic of 
those whose fiery words may set aflame the passions of bad 
instruments. In older days, an impious wretch burned the 
Temple at Ephesus, that he might, through such a sacri- 
lege, inherit undying mention, and he and Ravaillac, Booth and 
Guiteau, belong to the same class ; not demented, but devilish, 
fcjome one may object that the connection between our 
remissness in the conduct of affairs, and the murder of the 
President is morbid and overstrained. I cannot pause now 
to exhibit its completeness. If any efiect can be traced to 
its cause, I think we can easily show the near relationship 
between our inattention to — nay, our gross neglect of^— our 
duties as citizens, and the prevalence of a condition of things 
which renders, the conception and execution of such a crime, 
possible. And there are larger grievances, fruit of the same 
prolific germs, towards which, sooner or later, our afirighted 
eyes will be attracted by the inexorable necessities of some 
overshadowing menace. 

The careless mariner, whose ship, with swelling sails, is 
bowled along by auspicious breezes, takes snuall heed of the 
drift of undercurrents; but, when a storm darkens the hori- 
zon, and his vessel, trembling from stem to stern, from keel to 



16 

royal-truck, with the fury of tlie blast, is quickly reduced to 
reefed topsails, and is baffled by head winds, he makes closer 
reckonings by day, and heaves the lead by night, lest he 
should founder upon some beetling shore. And thus, while 
we seem to be prosperous and to be dwelling under auspicious 
conditions, we venture to be careless about political matters: 
by and by, the whirlwind we have been allowing to brew 
will burst upon us, and then, when it may be too late, we 
we will rouse ourselves to the exigency of threatened ruin, 
and exert ourselves to avert its completion. 

If the springs l)e impure, so will the streams be. We aban- 
don the prime movements in politics — the choice of represen- 
tatives — too much to the illiterate, the vicious, and the profli- 
gate ; to those who have the least interest in, the smallest 
regard for, good government. It needs only cursory observa- 
tion of current facts to discover some of the worst sequences 
of our reprehensible negligence. We concede that our legis- 
tive bodies are notorious for their incompetency, accused of 
bribei'y, and are said to reek with corruption. Legislation, 
it we may believe common rumor, is sold to the highest bidder. 
Place and power are put up, virtually, at auction. Corporations 
are multiplied. Charters bring their price. Great monopolies 
elect or defeat such delegates as they prefer or distrust. 
The governor of a State, who has the power to appoint judges, 
is, at the last hour, when his triumph seems assured, beaten 
by the votes of the employees of a railroad. These monstrous 
consolidations traverse one-half the Continent with continu- 
ous lines, and pervert the franchises, which were granted for 
the establishment of highways of commerce and inter com- 
munication, into the worst conceivable means of raising or 
depressing the prices of stocks. Colossal fortunes, through 
such speculations, are easily amassed, and become, in tlieir 
turn, engines of oppression. They control legislation, and 
support an audacious lobby. They bind and loose our traffic 
with such rules and regulations as may suit their convenience. 
Shall we raise no voice against these abuses? Do we owe 
nothing to the future ? Is our heritage wholly ours, to waste 



17 

and destroy, or are we trustees for our children to the remot- 
est generation ? Our rights are usufructs — not absolute. We 
may enjoy our liberties, but we owe it to ourselves, to human- 
ity, and to God, not to cheapen them. In our public conduct 
we appear to be alive only to the shibboleth and the discip- 
line of one party or the other ; to be prompted within its 
ranks by the blind zeal of faction. Our merchants gather 
and spend ; our professional men spin down technical 
grooves ; our skilled artisans mind their handicrafts. In the 
forum, in the cloisters of learning, in the daily marts, in the 
workshops, we are busy, each with his own concerns, and say 
to ourselveb : "let the world wag on, it will last our day." But 
this is not manly, nor virtuous, nor patriotic. 

We are debtors for our privileges, our prosperity ; we are 
unjust stewards if we accept these things unquestioning their 
divine vouchsafement, and take them as matters of course, as 
the thoughtless possess the dew, and the sunshine, and the light 
of stars, the early and the latter rain. Pardon me for my 
urgency, I am adhering to the text of the proclamation. I 
am neither alarmist nor pessimist. We are assembled to mourn, 
and to humiliate ourselves. Taught by the terrible monition 
of this untimely death ; shocked by the terrifying shedding 
of this innocent blood, which seems to be sprinkled on the 
doorposts of every home in the land, let us pray that the 
evils of our times may pass over; and to insure their removal, 
let us vow to become citizens in truth and in fact, and strain 
our utmost energies to fulfill every loyal obligation. 

If these solenm needs are apprehended, these warning les- 
sons are appropriated by us, then our great and good Presi- 
dent will not have died in vain. If they be not learned, it 
will be long indeed before heaven will grant such another to 
adorn private life, and give brighter radiance to public station. 

I consider the life of James A. Garfield, viewed either from 
its open or its private standpoint, the most perfect which has 
been lived in our century. I know of no one among his survi- 
vors who can be rated as his superior. Nor is this a new opinion 
of mine. It is no fresh estimate, beaten out by the hand of the 
2 



18 

destroyer; it is no mere sentimentality which serves to heighten 
the rhetoric of a memorial address. On more than one occa- 
sion, during the last canvass, (I presume that, without im- 
modesty, I may say it,) I had the honor to address some of the 
largest audiences which gathered in the states of New York 
and Pennsylvania. Twenty-seven times, during last autumn, 
I was permitted to appear before audiences, the least of which 
did not number less than twenty-five hundred listeners, and 
the burden of all my song, the theme of my warmest ad- 
vocacy, were the personal life and character of the noble 
gentleman who was the candidate of the Kepublican party, 
I studied him in campaign biographies, in his speeches, in his 
essays, in the maxims which he had contributed to enlight- 
en and convince others in a hundred debates. 

I remember when 1 first saw him, eighteen years ago, this 
fall, on the platform of a meeting in Monument Square. 
I recall the very words with which he was presented to 
the thousands of upturned eager faces, as the "brave Gen- 
eral Garfield, fresh from the army of the Tennessee." The 
people welcomed him as one, even then, not unknown, and 
hung upon his words of good cheer. I was invited to pass 
with him a large part of the evening of Thursday, the six- 
teenth of June, a day or two before he went to the ocean, 
with his convalescent wife. I knew him. 1 knew how ab- 
solutely frank and sincere he was, how ingenuous and direct. 
I knew what beautiful docility he united with stability of 
will. I knew what balance of judicial temper he evinced; 
that, although his perceptions were unusually quick, his 
meditative faculties were equally as active, and that the two 
sets worked together in perfect poise ; that what he saw or 
felt was dissolved in the alembic of judgment, and was crys- 
tallized there before it was formulated either in word or deed ; 
that he was a thinking man, a feeling man of exquisite sensi- 
bility and delicacy, an honest man, a Christian, a Christian 
politician, a Christian statesman. [Smiles in the audience.] 
Oh ! I am not surprised to see that some of you smile, yvhen I 
couple those words with such a prefix : Christian statesman ! a 



I 



19 

Christian politician ! How many of these are there? They 
are not abundant, hut they are to be seen ! And yet, here 
was one who never hesitated to avow his full confidence in 
the authenticity of the Christian system, who never disputed 
the divinity of Jesus, the God-man, his atonement and vica- 
rious sacrifice ; the authority of the Holy Scriptures ; a ration- 
al belief in another world ; and a fairer being beyond the 
grave, to whose duration he looked forward always for the 
infinite perfection and completion of his own grand nature. 
He turned aside from scepticism, from subtlety and dog- 
matism, refusing to accept the deductions of the materialists^ 
and the positivists, of the transcendentalists and the pantheists; 
believing with all the tenacity, as well as with all the inten- 
sity, of his cultivated intellect, in one God, though unseen, yet 
omnipotent, ever present, holding the ocean in the hollow of 
His hand, and giving to tlie spheres their courses. When 
science, through the telescope, revealed to him an extension 
of space, undreamed of by the ancients, and planets swim- 
ming in unimaginable remoteness; when it penetrated the 
bowels of the earth and counted the almost incredible ages 
of stratification, through which it had been travailing 
before its crust was fitted for 'the habitation of man ; when 
the microscope disclosed the myriad forms of sentient life; 
when he was made to realize that the seemingly complex and 
discordant wonders of creation were under the reign of im- 
mutable law, of which order and progressive change were the 
accordant elements ; when he looked down the corridors of 
the past, and saw that all the cycles of the ages had been 
impelling humanity forward out of individual life, out of 
tribal life, out of single isolated communities into great ag- 
gregations of political forces; when he saw great nations, 
obedient to the slowly operating potencies of civilization, 
being lifted up to their higher planes of enlightenment, with 
the progress of liberty, and science, and art ; — he said "these 
marvels, this unity of results, this slow but sure unfolding 
of cosmogonal motives, must and can come only from a 
God ; the spectacles which 1 behold only increase my vene- 



20 

ration ; they only enlarge my views of Him, deepen my faith 
in Him, give me a surer anchorage for my hopes, light up the 
dusty path from the grave to the gateway of that Paradise 
where all the mysteries that are inexplicable here will be 
opened to my sight, and I shall know the Great One in His 
majesty and splendor." O! glorious belief! that in the midst 
of the reverses, the enmities, the jealousies, and disappoint- 
ments of public contentions, could keep his spirit always on 
the wing tor "that glory which fadeth not away." A great 
liffht has gone out and it is well that the nation mourns. 
But as for him, we need not grieve ; he has joined the in- 
numerable retinue of torch-bearers, whose brightness illumines 
the realms of thought, and shines upon the resolute feet of 
those who ascend — 

"The great world's ivl tar-stairs, 
Which slope from darkness up to God." 

He had done much and very hard work to bring himself 
up to his own notions of efficiency; he had communed, one 
by one, with every one of the illustrious of the earth, who 
march, evermore, in that long line which reaches down from 
Homer to Tennyson ; from Herodotus to Motley ; from Aris- 
totle to Herbert Spencer ; from Demosthenes to Webster 
and Gladstone ; and each had imparted to him some sweet 
instruction ; had distilled into his very soul some vital juice 
of lofty aim or noble purpose. Aye ! that long procession, 
from Sophocles and Euripedes down to Shakspeare and 
Longfellow; from Plato to Bacon; from Virgil, Lucullus 
and Horace, to the great thinkers, great historians, great 
dramatists, great jurists, and great prophets of our own time. 
For there are living prophets who are foreseeing for us some 
of the things that are yet to be, of which science and art will 
give us copious volumes, which religion will not gainsay, but 
welcome with gladness. Galileo now might thunder in the 
Vatican. 

I was reading, only a little while ago, thp diary of General 
Garfield, which he kept while a student at Hiram College. 
It is a more than remarkable thing that, all through his pro 



I 



21 

gress, there was always to be found some notable woman at 
his side to sustain and to keep him pure and true. I found 
that when he was reading philosophy and history and litera- 
ture, it was Almeda E. Booth who was his help-meet ; walk- 
ing with him the flowery acclivities of Parnassus, or drinking 
with him from "the pure wells of English undefiled." What 
an enviable pupilage! None of us can forget the classic 
panegyrics of those passages in Cicero's oration for the poet 
Archias, in which the greatest rhetorician of Rome discourses 
upon the arts which concern the civilizing and humanizing of 
men, having some link which binds them together, connected 
by some relationship to one another. 

He affirms that he had persuaded himself from his youth 
upward, both by the precepts of many masters and by much 
reading, that there is nothing greatly to be desired but praise 
and honor, and that while pursuing these things; all tortures 
of the body, all dangers of death and banishment are to be 
considered of small importance; that even if there be no 
such great advantage to be reaped from literature, and if it 
were only pleasure which is to be sought from such studies, 
still it should be considered a most reasonable and liberal em- 
ployment of the mind, "for other occupations are not suited 
to every time, nor to every age or place ; but these studies are 
the food of youth, the delight of old age; the ornament of 
prosperity, the refuge and comfort of adversit}^ ; a delight at 
home, and no hindrance abroad ; they are companions by 
night, in journeys, in the country." 

Do you think the President could have become what he 
was, if he had not had so much of aptitude and assiduity ; 
if he had not gone to the very fountain head of intellectual 
advancement ? L remember reading, in the biography of Lord 
Macaulay, by Mr. Trevellyan, a speech which the former 
delivered in the House of Commons in favor of the intro- 
duction of civil service reform in the management of the gov- 
ernment of East India, as well as other papers which he wrote 
on the same subject, and in which he sought to show that"a man 
who is an applicant for an office is none the worse because he has 



22 

been a senior wrangler at Cambridge." Young gentlemen ! 
if you wish to pass through what some people call "this vale 
of tears," in the enjoyment of delicious days and compensa- 
tory nights; if you would gain stamina, and nerve, and pluck, 
to meet every dilemma and overcome every obstacle that, in 
the future, are certain to beset you ; if you want to acquit 
yourselves with credit, in every place to which you may be 
called, to seize every opportunity that may open before your 
footsteps ; if you mean, in a word, to climb, do not covet the 
winged sandals of Hermes, but strain every faculty to be 
acknowledged as votaries of that Pallas Athene, who typi- 
fies, in the significant myths of Hellas, the blending of 
chastity, valor and wisdom. There is nothing that so fully 
equips a man for great station as the having schooled himself 
in the amenities of art and literature. Learning gives us 
the eyes of an Argus, and the arms of a Briareus. And it 
was because General Garfield was thus accoutred, thus fur- 
nished within and without, that when the supreme moment 
came, a few years since, for him to step forward as the leader 
of a compact minority, and meet upon the floor of the 
House of Representatives the champions of an aggressive 
majority, in a speech of wonderful beauty and force, he over- 
came them all, and saw them, in the tumult of the arena, 
lying prostrate before him. He had made himself master of 
the processes of clear reasoning; he had acquired the fine 
faculty of detecting every vice and flaw in the argument op- 
posed to him ; he had gained that infallible, broad knowledge 
of the motives and consequences of political conduct, which 
one learns nowhere else so well as in good books. 

Ladies and gentlemen, friends, fellow-citizens I cannot we 
brinii: ourselves, in the spirit of the proclamation of President 
Arthur, in the spirit of this solemn occasion, with the gloom 
of this unspeakable bereavement encompassing us so awfully 
in spite of the outer-sunshine, to draw from such a catas- 
troplie the obvious lessons it was designed to teach us? A 
cloudy curtain is hanging before our eyes, with no landscape 
of hope in its foreground. No one can predict what the 



23 

■next mishap will be, what the next day will bring forth. 
Can we not, in the face of these tremendous realities, strive 
to consecrate ourselves to higher, and broader, and nobler 
.conceptions of responsibility for the consequences of our in- 
attention to the common requirements of citizenship. We 
ought to love our native land, and its children, and its institu- 
tions. We are united again, never to be disrupted unless 
through our own default. We all consent that ours is a 
priceless heritage. We give praise to the Ruler of Nations 
that he has made it absolutely free, and that there languishes 
not one slave between the Atlantic and the Pacific, the Lakes 
and the Gulf. Is it not, is it not, without any hyperbole, 
without any exaggeration, without any overweening conceit 
or unjustifiable pride — is it not the greatest, most favored 
country upon the face of the earth ? It is the only real 
republic that has ever flourished. Those of Greece, and 
Rome, and the Italian republics of the middle ages, were but 
mere phantasms compared to the living corpus of this great 
and growing Commonwealth of States. It is instinct and re- 
dundant with the genius of true freedom — national and indi- 
vidual. Where else do men live and never feel the hand of 
the Government laid upon them, in severity, so long as they 
observe its laws ? Where else is there so liberal and so admir- 
able a system of common school education ? Where else is 
taxation imposed with such strict adaptation to the real 
necessities of government, and such consideration for the cir- 
cumstances of the individual? Where else have we the same 
smooth, inaudible machinery? Where else is the same def- 
erence for law and order, the same proud and buoyant confi- 
dence in the rightmindedness of the masses of the people? 

When we are in a strait between two parties, we do not 
say that we will rally about so-called leaders ; when we are 
threatened, we do not say that we will follow the dictates of 
this party or that party. We say we will trust to the intelli- 
gence, to the apprehensions, to the sentiments,' of the majority 
of our countrymen. Under every circumstance incident to 
the fluctuations of civil policy, and proposed measures in 



24 

finance, in considerations of revenue or trade, we trust to the 
homely wit and consciences of the great body of voters ; and 
although we stand, to-day, in the midst of dismay and des- 
pondency, I think I am warranted, by our past experience, 
and by the recollection of recent events, in saying to you that 
we can trust to the great majority of our countrymen still ; 
in every exigency, but we want fewer of them ; in dilemmas, 
but we do not desire them to be too frequent ; in emergencies, 
but we want to remove the possibility of their costly occur- 
rence through .our own sins of omission or commission, 
through our failure to discern the perils which underlie 
universal suffrage, and those elective customs which induce 
thousands to become politicians for a livelihood, and con- 
vert so many into chronic holders of ofiice or perpetual 
seekers of office. 

When our best citizens are ready to participate in the pro- 
ceedings of conventions, and to serve on committees of organ- 
ization ; when our merchants, who are devoting themselves to 
the bargain and sale of goods and chattels, whose industry is 
expended upon 'Change and in the counting-room: — when cap- 
italists and solid men who have the ability to discharge public 
trusts, if they had the desire ; when all these are induced to 
bestir themselves to contest with the ignorant and the vicious 
the control of public affairs, we will have fewer occasions to 
look, as a last resort, and in extremities, to the right impulses 
and sentiments of "our sovereigns," when properly evoked. 
Did you ever think of it my friends, that there is not a single 
large city in the United States, at this time, which has in the 
councils of this nation a single eminent representative? Not 
one of them ! [Sensation.] I can safely challenge this intelli- 
gent audience to name a single gentleman, justly distinguished 
for great services or great talents, who is a member of either 
branch of the national legislature, or a deputy, from any one of 
our larger cities. And yet the word "politics" is a derivation 
from the Greek for "city." [Sensation.] Why is this? 
Whence do your great men come? From the rural districts ! 



25 

General Garfield was fortunate in his constituency, and 
they were prond of his ever increasing influence. It was a 
case of mutual attraction. The "plain folk" of the Ashtabula 
District were, for the most part, descendants of ancestors who 
had migrated from New England. Their habits were almost 
archaic, uncorrupted by enervating luxury, yet not indifferent 
to the mutations and fluctuations of the busy world. They 
were fond of books, and of papers; kept themselves abreast of 
public events; and were as tenacious in their opinions as they 
were steadfast in their friendship. They had noted young 
Garfield, from the time he made his first speech: they liked 
his mettle, and his downright straightforwardness ; liis honest 
face and voice, and the fullness and accuracy of his informa- 
tion. His behavior, in the Senate of Ohio, had given him a 
wider recognition : his brilliant engagements and prompt pro- 
motions, on his owm merits, after he entered the army, had won 
golden opinions from all sorts of men. It was not strange 
then, that in looking for a successor to Joshua R. Giddings, 
they should have selected the young legislator who had be- 
come so rapidly a successful soldier, with a reputation for 
gallantry, steadiness, and sound discretion, which had reached 
the ears of Lincoln and Stanton, and indeed had penetrated 
far beyond the War Department. They nominated and 
elected him, and, with an overwhelming majority, sent him 
forward, with the garland of their franchises over the laurel 
wreath he had plucked on stricken fields, along that high road 
to everlasting renown, upon which he made no misstep, until 
he reached its ultimate goal. 

He used to say, in his sententious way : "It is the unex- 
pected that always happens." But lasting reputation is never 
an accident. Men who wake up to find themselves cele- 
brated have done something to earn the guerdon of praise. A 
few cut their names, laboriously, letter by letter, upon tablets 
that do not yield to the corroding tooth of time ; but most 
men write theirs in the sand, and the next flow of the tide 
of opinions, ever changing, of fortunes always short-lived, 
w^ashes away the evanescent tracery. Although he began 



26 

in the valley, his gaze was constant towards the crests of 
the hills which are ever the boundaries of the dreamland 
youth. He knew that good food would give him stamina, 
and he fed his mind on no other. He knew that industry, 
rectitude, charity and suavity, would attract the good opinions 
first and then the kind support of others — and he cherished 
these aids to preferment. He was in dead earnest in all that 
he undertook, and counted no failures in his undertakings, 
because he measured his ability by the magnitude of the task 
which he set before himself, and when that demanded all his 
reserve forces, he bent to the labor until it was done, and well 
done. When he was appointed a member of the Committee of 
Ways and Means, and he felt it due to himself to become 
thoroughly posted with reference to political economy, he set 
himself to the acquisition of French, because some of the best 
authors had written in that language. 

But I have already detained you far beyond any proper or 
decorous bounds. It remains for me to say but a few words 
more. I have spoken of the youth, the statesman ; now I 
come to speak of the dying hero. 1 think that when each one 
of us draws near the end, and is bidden to lie down to die, 
that the example of the fortitude of James A. Garfield, will 
give us hardihood to look the grim conqueror of all men in 
the face. O ! what a glorious chamber of suffering that was 
at Washington, and afterwards, at Elberon ! What uncom- 
plaining and resignation he manifested, hour by hour, as the 
fading strength and flickering life were ebbing away,— so 
slowly — so excruciatingly. When first wounded, he said to 
Doctor Bliss : "Doctor, tell me the truth; I am not afraid to 
die." (He had said before, just after he was elected, to Mr. 
Hinsdale, the president of Hiram College : "no matter what 
may happen to me, the bitterness of death is past ; " it passed 
when he separated from his wife to go, in '61 , with the 42nd regi- 
ment, of Ohio, into the war; he had felt it all then.) "Doc- 
tor," he said, "tell me the truth ; what are my chances ?" 
"You have one chance, Mr. President, in a thousand." "Then, 
Doctor, we will take that chance." Not sanguine, yet willing 



27 

to live, but not afraid to die. And he took that chance. It 
is a most singular thing that during all that period of seventy- 
nine days of an agony that has been but little understood, 
because the physicians themselves were ignorant of the exact 
lodgment of the ball, and did not imagine that all the tender 
network of nerves that lie about the spine had been impinge(J, 
and some portions of it rudely shattered, and that the bullet 
was lying in the midst of sensitive organs, keeping him in 
constant torture, and that nothing but a heart of steel and nerves 
of iron restrained him from crying out with its pangs ; it is a 
singular thing, I say, that during all that time we have no 
mention of his ever having named, or spoken of, the brute by 
whom he had been shot down, but once, and then without a 
single word of anger; no indication of revenge or indignation or 
illtemper of any kind, no murmuring, no impatience. And 
how his friends clung to him ! General Swaim, Colonel Rock- 
well, and all those who were about him ; what fidelity, what 
tenderness, what sweet attachment! What gentleness, what 
courtesy he manifested toward one and all ! How he shrank 
from giving trouble. How he studied to avoid giving pain. 
You remember the tale that came to us over the wires, that 
after Mrs. Garfield had been speeding almost with the rapidity 
of lightning from Elberon to Washington, when she first en- 
tered into his presence, a heroine worthy her martyr, although 
he had but just recovered from the shock of the collapse that 
had prostrated him immediately after the crime, and when he 
seemed to be nearing the very edge of the precipice and about 
to plunge over into the unknown illimitable beyond, that even 
then, standing on this awful verge, when his wife came, there 
was a smile upon his face and a warm salutation to brace her 
heart from breaking outright. And then think of that last 
letter to his mother, written to make her think he was not 
hopeless, though he knew he had but one chance in a thous- 
and. 

What fortitude he displayed ! What Christian philosophy, 
unyielding strength of will, and sublime moral courage, to 
wait so patiently, facing the last scene in the drama, day by 



28 

day! O, what an awful vis-a-vis that was! Death here, and 
the "old soldier" lookini;; at him for seventy-nine days, not 
knowino; at what moment the skeleton hand would be laid 
npon liis heart, and its throbbing pulsations, its loves, would 
be abated forever. Wonderful life! Superb death ! Grand 
public service ! Noble private life I Illustrious statesman ! 
Benetactor of his race! James A. Garfield has become the 
property of history ; and if foreign nations are contempora- 
neous posterity we know what the judginent of history will 
be; for foreign nations have already proclaimed their admira- 
tion of the symmetry and perfection of his character, the lova- 
ble completeness of his rounded life. 

And now he is sleeping beneath the fresh mold of the 
grave in Lake View Cemetery. We have not seen the slow 
pace of tlie mournful procession, nor heard the soft dirge of 
its march, nor the requiem which has spoken peace to his 
slumbers! We have not seen the tearful assemblage as it 
gathered around the open sepulchre ; but our thoughts have 
been trending there. I am not sure that many of you, in sad 
fancy, have not been there even during the whole of my fee- 
ble, and I fear incongruous and inadequate, discourse to you 
this evening. Many and many a time even I have found 
myself listening to catch the sounds of the bells and the far- 
off sighing that has broken from the sore hearts of his nearest, 
and dearest, around that memorable tomb. 

Oh, if we could only pray as they prayed in olden times ! 
If there was only some one now who could give the word of 
command : "To your tents, O, Israel ! to your tents !" If 
we could only see the Ark of the Covenant of promise for 
our civil liberties carried before us! If we could only long 
for a fuller manhood! If we only had a profounder realiza- 
tion of our duties of citizenship ! If we could only see in 
this dispensation the hand of a kind and merciful Father, 
and hear His voice persuading us to draw from it its deeper 
and more significant lessons through the next two decades 
of the Republic, and until its full first century shall be 
told ! Ah, then, we would not hear again the voice of fac- 



29 

tion, nor hearken to the chiniors of parties ; we would not 
tolerate again the recriminations and embittering antagonisms, 
which once sundered, and have kept us too long apart as a 
people. But we would all try to do our best for our com- 
mon land. We would claim but one name, one common 
country, one common destiny. Children of one kind beauti- 
ful mother, the Union, we would never weary in aiding to 
make her more beneficent, more beautiful, and resolve to see 
that her graces shall be perpetual 

Dead! Garfield dead I Why, that name was a synonym 
for abounding vitality, unfailing vigor. Dead ! Has he 
spoken a long farewell to all his greatness? His heart quick- 
ens no more with tenderness for mother, or wife, or children ! 
Well may we say "what shadows we are, what shadows we 
pursue." 

"This is the state of man : to-day he puts forth 
The tender leaves of hope ; to-morrow blossoms, 
And bears his blushing honors thick upon him ; 
The third day, comes a frost, a killing frost." — 

Is it the old story of the preacher, "vanity of vanities, 
all is vanity"? Nay, not so! Such a life is never finished! 
He has added to the store of human knowledge, and his 
influence will widen "with the process of the suns." There 
is another lustrous name to be emblazoned on the rolls that 
never turn to dust ; another statuesque figure for monu- 
mental marble and bronze ; another splendid model for the 
young to follow, for the older to emulate ; another great type 
of courage, brave endeavor, and unenvied success. Dead, 
yet living! Living forevermore to speak down the centuries, 
and call the lowly to honor, the valiant to victory, and the 
pure in heart to the kingdoms of this world, and the world to 
come ! 



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